eHarmony Prospers Thanks To Big Data

Nobody, and I mean nobody, is crushing social media marketing like HowAboutWe, but I do like some of the social media stuff coming from eHarmony. How Ironic that most of the eHarmony posts on this blog are about their technology.

Its crazy that the media is *still* regurgitating the four-year-old self-published stats that an average of 542 people married every day in the US after meeting through eHarmony. And what’s with the statistic that eHarmony has 33 million users across 150 countries? All anyone cares about is active members, and that number sure ain’t 33 million.

As well as the questionnaire, eHarmony also mines “a ton of data” on its users, mainly from their activities on the website. User behaviour is an integral part of how eHarmony works, as it helps predict the success of users on the site.

An example of this is predicting communication levels for different people using eHarmony. There are a number of factors involved, including how many times a user logs on to the website, how many photos they post, and the number of words they use to describe themselves on their eHarmony profiles.

“Form that data, you can tell who is more introverted, who is likely to be an initiator, and we can also see if we give people matches at certain times of the day, they would be more likely to make communication with their matches.

Amen to that. Things get pretty interesting when you start varying the daily sends of member match emails. You start to see differences between countries and different demographics and hopefully keep tuning to optimize clicks back to the site. Online dating has evolved to the point where its all about marketing spend optimization, customer lifetime value and mining the hell out of the database for behavioral data that can be used to engage more members. Nothing else matters.